Flux Pavilion recently said he does not believe dubstep is dying as a genre, and that certainly seemed to be the theme of the Safe In Sound Festival. Five artists lined up at the Hollywood Palladium on 18 October 2014 to prove that catchy synths and wobbling basslines are still very much in fashion.

One would not peg the Hollywood Palladium as a venue to host a music “festival,” but surprisingly, it gelled extremely well with the size and theme of Safe In Sound. The circular dance floor, surrounded by balconies on all sides, ensured that everyone could have the type of concert experience they preferred. Lines were manageable for the concert, and getting inside took less than fifteen minutes, which is almost unheard of for a lineup such as this one.

The lineup could best be described in one word: eclectic. Every single artist brought something new to the floor that distinguished him or her from the rest, yet kept with the dubstep genre in some way. Terravita opened up the night with some pulse pounding basslines and revved up the crowd in preparation for the bigger acts to come. The band’s style is most distinctly reflected in their popular single Bach Off, where they combine orchestral sounds akin to those of Bach [Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565)] with nervewracking bass to create a powerful mixture. The trio, hailing from Los Angeles, proves that not everything in dubstep is generic.

Caked Up, the duo comprised of Oscar Wylde and Vegas Banger, went on next, showcasing the kind of music that can only be enjoyed with bass that pops eardrums. Their blend of trap and dubstep featured some surprises, such as a remix of the Tetris theme that nobody expected in what was an applause-worthy set.

It was at first confusing to see a drumset and guitars being set up on stage next, but all was explained once Destroid, the heavy metal trio, came on. Never has the medley of dark chords on the guitar, metal band screaming and wobbling bass sounded so right. Donning matching suits with Tron-esque lights synced to the music, their performance was certainly one to remember.

Then came on the first of the two headlining acts: Adventure Club. Their signature style of dubstep infused with reflective melodies and heartwarming vocals are always a pleasure to hear. They played tracks that have shot them up to fame and also debuted two unreleased singles. With some stage dives and bouncy props, they interacted with the crowd the most out of any act, which is admirable considering the size of the event.

Staying true to tradition, the festival saved the best for last, as a roaring crowd welcomed Flux Pavilion himself to the stage. His thumping beats infused with catchy synths stand as a testament to his superior control over this genre. But rather than stick to dubstep, Flux played tunes from a whole range of genres, including trap, drum and bass, and a great rendition of Queen’s We Will Rock You. He sent shivers through the crowd with his signature track, I Can’t Stop, and surprised everyone when he pulled out the theme for Star Wars Rebels that he had been working on. This was one night where Flux proved he was as diverse as any artist in the electronic dance music scene.

All in all, Safe In Sound was as its name describes; a comfortable and fun music experience that brought along some great surprises, a sold out Hollywood Palladium and stellar performances from each of the artists.

A divided staircase in the middle of an elegant entrance hall painted white. Crystal chandeliers, parquet floors, gold brocade-upholstered furniture, views through spacious windows of manicured lawns leading to a lake. And a baker’s half-dozen of children continually popping up to harmonize.

Picture, by contrast, a mostly unfurnished four-bedroom town house in northeast Portland, Oregon. The neighborhood is called Hollywood, which is ironic, because this is real life. The bedrooms are occupied by the real grandchildren of one of the real von Trapp children immortalized in the movie. That would be Kurt, “the incorrigible one,” whose name was actually Werner. The house is unfurnished partly because the four siblings – Sofia (known as Sofi), Melanie, Amanda and August, who range in age from twenty-five down to nineteen – haven’t lived there very long, but mostly because they use the house to rest their heads at night and eat a bowl of cereal in the morning. They spend the rest of their time doing a very Sound of Music-y thing. Singing.

They’ve been singing together since they were mere babes, and doing their public “shtick,” as Sofi calls it, for about thirteen years: most of their lives, that is.

The road to the town house in Holly­wood started with a decision made years ago by the von Trapp kids’ father, Stefan – son of Werner, grandson of Captain von Trapp (otherwise known as Christopher Plummer), step-grandson of Maria (Julie Andrews). He had grown up in Vermont with a bunch of cousins, and ultimately decided the atmosphere and the real and cinematic bloodlines were a bit oppressive. With his wife, Annie, he moved far away – to Kalispell, Montana, where he learned stonemasonry skills, opened a business, and had three girls and a boy. Werner would visit in the summer – to the kids he was always “Opa,” German for “grandpa” – and teach them the Austrian folk songs he had sung as a child. One summer he was too ill to make the trip, and the kids recorded their first homemade CD so he could hear it back in Vermont.

In 2001, the New Age pianist George Winston heard the children sing at a festival in Montana and was impressed enough to have them open for him while he was touring the state. Gradually, they began to get gigs of their own. At the start, their set list consisted of Austrian folk songs and Sound of Music selections. August, who joined his sisters when he was seven, wearing lederhosen to their dirndls, was first soprano.

Stefan had done masonry work for television-series wildlife guru Jack Hanna, who has a house in Montana, and through him became friendly with Wayne Newton, whom the kids knew from the Chevy Chase movie Vegas Vacation. Newton gave them what Amanda calls “amazing advice.”

“It was right when August’s voice was changing,” Melanie says, “and so you asked him –” Sofi picks up the story: “Somehow, I asked him how he went through his voice change. Obviously, he had such a high voice. And he said he just kept singing the high notes and he was able to keep his falsetto.” “It was good advice,” August says, “but man, it was hard. I never knew when my voice would, like explode. It was like a time bomb.”

Touring the country, the siblings began to comprehend the magnitude of the Sound of Music story, and what it meant to people. “After the show, people would come up to us and would be like, ‘I met your grandmother. . . . I heard her sing in this hall fifty years ago,’” Melanie says. “That’s when we started to kind of understand that we were carrying on something.”

“We would hear people say, ‘I saw The Sound of Music when I was six years old, and it made me realize what I was going to do with my life,’” Amanda says. “And then they would thank us for something we almost had nothing to do with. That weight of importance always rested on us. We knew it wasn’t just about ourselves.”

It may seem odd, but it’s nonetheless true that the von Trapp family was famous before The Sound of Music. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical opened on Broadway in 1959 and was based on a 1949 book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, by Maria von Trapp. This is the same Maria played by Mary Martin on stage and Julie Andrews on screen, a postulant who was hired by Captain Georg Ritter von Trapp, a widower, as a tutor for one of his children (not a governess for all of them, as in the musical), and ended up marrying him. (That part was true.) As early as 1935, with the encouragement of and under the direction of an Austrian priest, Franz Wasner, Maria and her stepchildren formed a vocal group that performed professionally at the Salzburg Festival; in 1937 they went on a tour of Europe and even made a television appearance on the BBC.

The following year, the Nazis annexed Austria. Because the von Trapps’ former home, the city of Trieste, had become part of Italy, the family possessed Italian passports and used them to get on a train out of the country, eventually settling in the United States. (The musical’s exodus on foot over the mountains is another invention by the librettists, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.) Within the year, accompanied by Father Wasner, they made their first tour of the United States, capped off by a well-received concert in New York’s Town Hall. The New York Times observed, “There was something unusually lovable and appealing about the modest, serious singers of this little family aggregation as they formed a close semicircle about their self-effacing director for their initial offering, the handsome Mme. von Trapp in simple black, and the youthful sisters garbed in black and white Austrian folk costumes enlivened with red ribbons. It was only natural to expect work of exceeding refinement from them, and one was not disappointed in this.”

The family lived for a time in Merion, Pennsylvania, and eventually settled in Vermont. But from the beginning, the Singers – eventually including the three children of Maria and the Captain – spent a good part of the year touring the country, offering audiences in Iowa or New Mexico exotic and ultimately heartwarming sights and sounds. In a typical concert, the family opened with sacred selections, perhaps a Gregorian chant and a Bach piece, then did an instrumental portion (recorders, spinet and viola da gamba), followed by madrigals. After intermission, they changed into their trademark Austrian outfits – dirndls for the girls, lederhosen for the boys – and did a set of Austrian folk songs, a demonstration of crowd-pleasing yodels and finally a selection of international folk songs.

Part of the appeal of the Trapp Family Singers – they judiciously dropped the “von” after settling in the United States – was the contrast they offered to happenings in their native country and neighboring Nazi Germany. The New York Times, reviewing their “picturesque” 1940 holiday Town Hall concert, commented that they “afforded the large audience a glimpse into an Austria, not of storm troopers, but of devout families who sing and make music at home in the evenings.” Feature reporters found they made good copy as well. One 1946 article reported, “In the hotel dining room, the Baroness Maria von Trapp, a tall, strong blue-eyed woman in radiant health, dressed like her daughters and like them, without make-up, firmly pressed our hand, and then introduced us to the Baron, a twinkling-eyed man who looked like Santa Claus with a mustache instead of a beard.”

The tour eventually expanded to as many as one hundred twenty-five performances a year, and according to William Anderson, author of The World of the Trapp Family, became “the most heavily booked attraction in concert history.” He doesn’t cite a source for that assertion, but with their annual tour, RCA Victor recordings, occasional television appearances and Maria’s best-selling memoir, there’s no doubt the von Trapps were a significant cultural institution.

However, by the arrival of the new decade of the ’50s, some of the siblings were marrying and having children and getting into professions like medicine and forestry, making it necessary for non-family ringers to don the dirndls and lederhosen on stage. There was also a sense, among some observers, that the act had worn a little thin. “No matter what they were up to, the Trapps did their work in a tentative, unbending manner – smiling nervously now and then – and the audience, to judge by the applause that followed each number, was pleased by this show of diffidence,” wrote Douglas Watt of the New Yorker, reviewing the 1951 Christmas concert. Watt wasn’t charmed. “There was so much gemütlichkeit in the air that it began to grow stuffy, and I left before they got to the carols.”

The group finally disbanded after a farewell tour, featuring In stiller Nacht [by Brahms], in the beginning of 1956. By that time the Captain and one of his daughters had died. Some of the siblings dispersed around the country and the world, but Maria continued to operate a ski lodge in Stowe, Vermont, and many of her children and their families were nearby. (The lodge is still operated by her son Johannes and his family. Maria died in 1987, and the last of her stepchildren, also named Maria, in 2014.)

A German film based on the family story was released in 1956, and eventually caught the attention of musical comedy star Mary Martin. She decided it would be a perfect vehicle – with Martin herself playing Maria, of course, and a score consisting of the Trapp family repertoire. She brought on a producer, Leland Hayward, commissioned the team of Lindsay and Crouse to write a script, and approached Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein (with whom she’d had a spectacular success in South Pacific) to come up with a single original song. Rodgers describes his reaction in his autobiography, Musical Stages: “If they wanted to do a play using the actual music the Trapps sang, fine, but why invite a clash of styles by simply adding one new song? Why not a fresh score? When I suggested this to Leland and Mary they said they’d love to have a new score, but only if Oscar and I wrote it.”

Write it they did. The show opened on Broadway in 1959 and was a smash hit, despite some critical carping about its sentimentality. The London production the following year was an even bigger success, and even bigger than that was the Julie Andrews film. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture and grossed a whopping $126 million at the box office.

The film has never really ended its run, of course, being presented in recent years in karaoke-style sing-alongs where audience members dress as characters and even song lyrics. (A brown paper package tied up in string is a popular choice.) In December 2013, NBC presented a live television version of the musical with Carrie Underwood as Maria. Although the reviews were, as always, mixed, the production got fabulous ratings.

The consensus among the family Trapp was that the musical got the heart of the story right, though there was and is some grumbling about that escape hike, the changing of names (and sometimes gender) of some of the siblings, and, especially, the depiction of the warm, Santa Claus-like Captain as a patrician meanie.

But none of that mattered. The film catapulted the family from renown to full-blown celebrity, and there was nothing they could do about it. From time to time, the Trapp Family Singers got out the dirndls and lederhosen and put on a reunion concert. But there was no follow-up, as everyone by that time had demanding lives.

It would not be until the 1970s that the music coursing through the von Trapp DNA would again get expressed in a concerted manner. First came Werner’s daughter Elisabeth von Trapp, who strapped a guitar on her back as a teenager and ever since has traveled the country as a folk singer.

Then came her Montana nieces and nephew. The touring and performing was fun for a while, but about four years ago, with the sisters at college age, they decided, as Sofi says, “to stop singing, and go to school, and kind of pursue our own dreams.” They each enrolled in a different college, and August started attending high school in Chicago. “It was our first time being with kids our own age,” Amanda says. (The siblings were home-schooled.) Then, in 2010, they got a call from a producer from Oprah, asking if they would appear on a special Sound of Music forty-fifth anniversary show. And how could they turn down a chance to sing Edelweiss with Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and the rest of the surviving cast from the film?

After the show aired, there were offers from all around the world. Again, the touring started. Again, it began to wear on them. One of the last concerts on their contract came in December 2011: singing with the Oregon Symphony at Portland’s Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

“The symphony called up and said, ‘We’ve got the von Trapps,’” recalls Thomas Lauderdale, the founder and leader of Pink Martini, who is a lifelong Portland resident. “‘Can they be on stage with you?’ And it was, you know, I mean, I just sort of flipped out, I was so excited.”

Lauderdale, who is forty-three, has spiked white-blond hair and usually wears a bow tie, had grown up as a big fan of TheSound of Music. In fact, Pink Martini performed The Lonely Goatherd, a yodeling showcase from the musical, at the second concert it ever did. When he met the von Trapps, he found himself impressed by more than their bloodlines and their pipes. “They were paying a different kind of attention than most people are ever paying,” he said. “I think it has to do with them not having watched television as kids. There’s a certain look in people who haven’t grown up watching TV. There’s a different gaze.”

Lauderdale’s perception was on target. “No, we didn’t have a TV,” Melanie says. She’s the second oldest, at twenty-four, and, like her brother and sisters, personable, fresh-faced, modest and nice. “Our dad didn’t grow up watching it, and neither of our parents were into the whole TV thing. I mean, we watched Bill Nye the Science Guy once in a while.” Later, it emerges that none of the siblings has heard of Pee-wee Herman.

Lauderdale thought their sound was terrific, too. “The way they sing comes from the way they’ve grown up together, been in the same room together all these years,” he says. “I don’t think that exists anywhere in the world, this combination of talent, experience, family history and parents with the wisdom not to park them in front of televisions. It was an amazing thing to behold.”

Then, in April 2012, Lauderdale asked them to join Pink Martini for a symphony show in Indianapolis. It was there that the idea of making an album together began to develop. “It was kind of the second time we’d really hung out with Thomas,” Amanda says, “and he slid the sheet music for Dream a Little Dream over across the table towards me. He had no way of knowing it, but that song was my lullaby growing up.”

Lauderdale had the notion that August would strum the ukulele on the song, a Tin Pan Alley standard from the early ’30s. The only trouble was, August had never played the ukulele. “At first, it was really difficult,” he says. “But eventually you just keep at it, and your fingers mold into getting used to it.”

Dream a Little Dream, with Amanda on lead vocal, Thomas on uke and Sofi on melodica, is the title track of the disc. In Stiller Nacht is on it. The rest of the lineup emerged by inspiration and serendipity. “I asked a lot of questions,” Lauderdale says. “‘Who all do you like? Who do you listen to? Who would you love to work with?’ At the top of the list was the Chieftains.” It turns out that Paddy Moloney’s venerable Irish group once shared management with Pink Martini, and the siblings journeyed to Dublin to collaborate with them on Thunder, one of three haunting New-Agey songs composed by August on the CD. (“My hope in reality,” says the lyric, “comes flowing from my dreams.”) There’s a cover of the ABBA song Fernando, Hushabye Mountain from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and carefully curated songs from China, Japan, Israel, France and Rwanda.

And how could there be a von Trapp album without including any songs from The Sound of Music? In fact, Dream a Little Dream has two, The Lonely Goatherd and Edelweiss, and a guest vocalist on both is Charmian Carr, the original “sixteen going on seventeen” Liesl. Not long after making the film, Carr moved from acting to a career as a decorator, but she never stopped participating in Sound of Music events. At a 2000 singalong at the Hollywood Bowl, she met Lauderdale. While making Dream a Little Dream, he invited Carr to participate and she accepted without hesitation. Not only did Carr feel the von Trapps’ sound was “exquisite,” she says from her home in Encino, California, but she formed a quick and deep bond. “I told them they felt like my own children,” she says.

In Portland, Amanda von Trapp says that singing with Carr was one of the high points of making the record. “Here are five people in the studio who would have no connection otherwise,” she says. “It’s so distant, but so close. She represented this story that our grandparents went through. And everybody loves this story, and her role especially, being Liesl.”

The granddaughter of the brother of the person Carr played on screen pauses. “It was a little surreal,” she adds.

Studio execs shopping for tent pole biopic projects in the manner of Amadeus (1984), Ghandi (1982), Lincoln (2012) and The King’s Speech (2010) at the Cannes Film Festival this year will likely stop in their tracks when they see the promotional poster for Bach, an ambitious biography of the great German composer, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).

Embossed over the imposing painting of the composer are the words “ORPHAN CONVICT REBEL GENIUS.” Although it seems like a crass Hollywood media spin on the life of a highly revered musician who spent most of his career as a church organist and composer of religious and secular works for royalty, town counsels, church authorities and children’s choirs, JSB was indeed all those things and more, says Bach co-producer and writer, Jeffrey M. Freedman. “Bach came from a long line of highly accomplished musicians and probably would have been remembered as just another dead, great Bach if it wasn’t for several remarkable events in his life,” says Freedman.

The short list includes:

Being orphaned by the time he was ten years of age.

Chronically complaining about employers he claimed underpaid him or didn’t supply him with enough able musicians and beer, which prompted the Duke of Weimar to have him thrown in jail when he threatened to walk out on a gig.

Living larger than life in terms of several human appetites, which was partly responsible for his taking two wives, with whom he had twenty children.

Re-writing the rules of composition so that music expressed the most personal and passionate inner life of the composer.

Collaborating with the world’s first head-strong, irascible and extremely talented, cigar smoking, cursing, confrontational feminist librettist who put words to his cantatas and attended what Bach initiated as the first extemporaneous live jam sessions at taverns and cafes in Leipzig, Germany, which are still in operation today.

Co-producer S. J. Evans said from Cannes that even before Bach set up shop at the prestigious Producers Network at this year’s festival, industry reaction to the biopic has been overwhelmingly positive. “In addition to development funding by Film Agency for Wales, Warner Brothers and Universal Studios have expressed interest in the project, as well as a number of German co-producers Jeff and I have spoken with.”

Asked about the director and actor slated to play the eponymous subject of the biopic, Evans is playing those cards close to his chest. “Much like the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which Jeffrey discovered is replete with courage, grace, tragedy, crime, bravado, passion and the expansive beauty of the life and visual canvas of J. S.Bach’s inner and outer universe, we promise the choice of director and lead will be no less spectacular and fitting of the singular artistic genius of Johann Sebastian Bach.”

Chris Thile has never been shy about genre-hopping. In his early twenties, singing and playing with the band Nickel Creek, the mandolin virtuoso covered songs by slacker-rock heroes Pavement, picking along with a fiddler and a guitarist. And a year ago, he was onstage with his band at Bonnaroo, the Tennessee summer music festival, working the crowd with acoustic string-band covers of rock songs by The Cars, Radiohead and others.

Now, he’s trying to get the same fans just as excited about classical music. For his latest record, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas Vol. 1, Mr. Thile, 32, has taken an approach of unadorned simplicity: It is just him, alone in a room with his mandolin, playing three suites – sixteen tracks in all – of works written for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach, the master composer of late-Baroque church music.

Mr. Thile argues that the same crowds that headbang to Radiohead anthems should be just as able to get psyched for Bach or Mahler.

“The great musics of the world are great for very similar structural reasons: good melody, good harmony, and a balance of feminine and masculine energy. What makes one type of music classical and one bluegrass and one folk – these things aren’t what’s important,” he said at a recent interview in midtown Manhattan. “My thesis statement would be – Bach didn’t write Baroque music. He wrote great music.”

At times, Mr. Thile’s new record has the same technical “wow factor” as his work with his band, Punch Brothers. On the Presto from Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G minor (BWV 1001) for example, Mr. Thile’s fingers trace Bach’s elegant melody lines and near-nonstop arpeggios at an off-to-the-races tempo, up and down the neck of his instrument – not unlike a bluegrass fiddle tune.

At other points, such as the Allemanda from the Partita No. 1 in B minor (BWV 1002), Mr. Thile plays in a purely Baroque vernacular, shedding any trace of bluegrass and making his mandolin sound stately and delicate, not unlike the lutes played by Bach’s Renaissance forebears.

Born in Oceanside, California in 1981, Mr. Thile grew up in Southern California listening to folk music on the local public-radio station and hearing live bluegrass bands at a pizza shop in nearby Carlsbad. He first picked up a mandolin – the eight-stringed instrument that most fans of traditional country music remember best in the hands of bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe – when he was five years old. His piano-tuner father and his mother were “folkies,” he said, and his maternal grandfather, Robert Shallenberg, was an avant-garde composer who taught music at the University of Illinois and Indiana University.

At age fourteen, Mr. Thile’s family moved to southwestern Kentucky – within a few hours’ drive from both the birthplace of bluegrass music and the cradle of pop country music, Nashville – after his father got a job at Murray State University. Mr. Thile would later attend Murray State for three semesters.

Nickel Creek, Mr. Thile’s first band, won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 2003 for their Alison Krauss-produced album, This Side, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and later went gold. Mr. Thile founded his current band, Punch Brothers, in 2006 to help him record one of his own compositions, and the core of the band later backed him on his solo album How to Grow a Woman from the Ground. The group gelled around a style that recalled “new grass” of the 1970s and 1980s, which incorporated jazz and rock into the traditional string-band style, and has recorded three albums and sold more than 200,000 albums, according to its label, Nonesuch Records.

Mr. Thile moved to New York eight years ago, and has over the years added vocals and instrumental parts to records by Top 40 country singers including Eric Church, Keith Urban, and his friend Dierks Bentley.

Last year, he was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship – commonly known as the “genius grant” – and in 2011 made a richly composed fusion record with a classical-bluegrass supergroup headed by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, all while keeping up a punishing tour schedule with Punch Brothers and other groups. He and Punch Brothers were recently tapped to sing and play on the soundtrack to Inside Llewyn Davis, a forthcoming film by Joel and Ethan Coen, which follows a week in the life of a fictional folk singer in early-1960s Greenwich Village.

“He’s one of those people where, there’s nothing that he becomes interested in that he doesn’t go all the way in,” said Mr. Ma, the multiple-Grammy-winning cellist who has recorded and toured with Mr. Thile. “When he’s playing Bach, it’s with the utmost understanding of the human condition. He responds to the nature of the instrument, and he becomes the content. He’s organically attuned to the music.”

There is some precedent for bluegrass pickers dabbling in classical music – banjoist Bela Fleck recorded an album of the works of Bach, Debussy, Chopin and others in 2001. Mr. Ma has collaborated with classical bassist Edgar Meyer and fiddler Mark O’Connor on several classical-folk fusion records.

But few bluegrass musicians have embraced classical music so thoroughly: Mr. Thile in 2009 premiered his first concerto for mandolin and orchestra, and Punch Brothers have taken to playing the third movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major (BWV 1048) at concerts, interspersed amid the band’s usual melodic, progressive bluegrass songs. “You should just watch people flip!” Mr. Thile says. “I’m not saying you’ve got to like, jump up and down and scream during a Bach performance,” he says, before noting that “the classical music hall was like that, two hundred years ago, you know. You have reports of people, you know, whooping and hollering and demanding encore performances of things. . . . They were riotous!”

This month, Mr. Thile is touring with Mr. Ma, Mr. Meyer, Nashville Bluegrass Band fiddler Stuart Duncan and singer Aoife O’Donovan in support of their 2011 album The Goat Rodeo Sessions, followed by an international solo tour, on which he will play cuts from the Bach record, starting in early October.

“Chris is a leading edge of a generational shift,” said T Bone Burnett, a legendary music producer who has made records with a wide array of pop and Americana acts, including Counting Crows, Elton John, Elvis Costello and Willie Nelson. Mr. Burnett first heard of Punch Brothers from a mutual friend and asked them to be a part of a benefit-concert series that he organized in New York and Boston in 2010. From there, the band worked with Mr. Burnett, well-known for his work curating music for Hollywood films, on the The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond. It was Mr. Burnett who asked Mr. Thile’s band to play on the Coen Brothers’ film soundtrack, which he is producing.

Separately, Mr. Thile is searching for a home to buy in New York City with his girlfriend, the television actress Claire Coffee, and practicing on a 1924 Gibson F5 mandolin, designed by legendary instrument-maker Lloyd Loar, an heirloom instrument that he bought last year using some of the $500,000 grant he won as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s genius award (Mr. Thile declined to say how much he paid for the instrument, but original Loar mandolins can cost up to $250,000). He says that these days, money is flush enough that he doesn’t take studio work unless it is for friends.

“They’re all passion projects for me. . . . It hasn’t always been that way. When someone came at me with a high number it used to be very hard to say no,” Mr. Thile says. “Now I can’t even believe I’m in the position I’m in.”

The only two things missing in Bach’s music are randomness and sex. And yet in our era – so consumed with both – Bach has not lost his appeal. Bach’s ongoing star quality and his endless DNA-like capacity for mutation and adaptation are the subject of Paul Elie’s passionate and grand book [Reinventing Bach]. It is a work with a cast of thousands, circling its protagonist. I got the feeling as I read along that Bach was coursing through history like a fugal superhero. There really was no end to his capabilities: repairing organs, dispensing epiphanies, keeping pace with technological transformation, driving Glenn Gould insane, healing wounds of war, being ignored in the D.C. metro, helping Steve Jobs to release the iPad. Citizens of Gotham, look to your stereos!

At this point nobody needs to be told that Bach is good. The votes are in. But mass approval is a force to be reckoned with, and the intensity of humanity’s worship of Bach has unforeseen consequences. I propose to reverse-engineer the usual praise. Rather than using our words to measure his goodness, we can use his music as a standard to measure our ideas of the good, to assess our prejudices about virtue.

An iconic place to start is the almost-too-famous opening of the forty-eight preludes and fugues known as The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93). (Beethoven called this collection the Bible.) The first prelude is the foundation – let there be light! – and what you see on the page is a set of arpeggios, nothing more. For the premise of a grand project there is no grandiosity; there are only three austerities. There is no melody; each measure has the same rhythm; each measure has the same contour. In this monotonous stream of arpeggios, there is no distraction, no “surface noise,” and so we hear clearly when two notes come dissonantly close and are resolved, and we take notice when a voice leaps up, climbs, or descends in a long line: all these motions, the raw materials of musical meaning, are revealed like stage machinery that suddenly comes out from behind the scenes. The craft of voice-leading itself becomes the focus of attention and proves more riveting than the usual show.

One could go on and on with instances in which Bach, through one stratagem or another, draws our ear straight to the movement of the pitches. This element of Bach’s music – the compositional gesture directing us to “just the notes,” as if music were not just notes anyway – gets transferred into the world of Bach interpretation, into the mystique of his devotees. Here is a typical example, from a profile of the fine pianist Angela Hewitt, a Bach specialist, in The New York Times: “… the greatest compliment for Ms. Hewitt came from her father, who after listening to one of her recordings, said: ‘I didn’t hear you. I only heard Bach.’” It is a bit strange for an artist to vanish in her own profile – but this is the clichéd credo of Bach performance. You hear it all the time in Bach lessons and master classes: the student is told not to add anything of himself, to avoid the personal, to stick with the universal, to dissolve into the composer. The personal is an impurity and Bach is distilled water. Purity arrives very early in Elie’s book, on page nine: Bach is “the great exception, a site of purity in our sullied lives.” And later Elie writes a poetic passage about vanishing: “The organist is done away with. So is the church building. So are the limits of space and time, of stamina and attention. The music of Bach is all that is left….”

This is Bach as David Copperfield, making everything disappear. It is powerful and very prevalent, this desire for nothing but Bach pure, this trope of the falling away of all the specific trappings, leaving the universal essence behind. In this respect, we may compare Bach with the other father figure of “classical music”: Beethoven is great, but he is not pure. Beethoven reached toward a tortured purity in the late years, and attained a noble perfection in the middle ones (the “Archduke” Trio); but he himself never vanishes. His music seems hewn out of his will, an assertion of the individual and the artist as hero. Bach, by contrast, self-effaces. He is no hero; it is we who have made an unwilling hero out of him.

One great advantage Bach has over Beethoven is counterpoint. Late in life Beethoven obsessed over Bach, working at counterpoint and fugue feverishly – as if to purify himself, to escape from the heroic sonata forms that he had brought to their apex. In a “song without words” by Mendelssohn or a nocturne by Chopin, you usually have the opposite of counterpoint: a melody over repeated chords or a texture of arpeggios – that is, filler, something to make the chords last some time while the melody melodizes. There is a hierarchical distinction between foreground and background, between the prominent main voice and the backup band. But in “true counterpoint” no voice is the lapdog of a melody; each voice lives independently. For us humble listeners, whose lives are filled with filler, this seems like an unattainable miracle: everything counts.

Bach’s insistence on the integrity of every voice (against history, against fashion) is a second form of purity, to set beside his humility. But he is not done being pure, not by a long shot: more than any other composer, Bach represents the triumph of pure logic. He is synonymous with the fugue – the music of proposition, propagation, permutation. And the fugue was hardly the most math-like of his genres. Elie describes the discovery of the “puzzle canons,” based on the “Goldberg” bass, which musicologists scrambled to solve: music as Sudoku. One of Bach’s sons related the story that his father would hear a musical idea and would instantaneously know all the operations that could be carried out on it. Think about it – a musical idea is not a catchy tune, it is something operable; calculations can be performed on it. Like a musical-mathematical savant, Bach would then wait for these things to occur: for the idea to be played backward (retrograde), or upside down (inversion), or twice as slow (augmentation), whatever; and he was gleeful when arcane combinatorial expectations were met. It is a powerful element of the Bach aura: no matter how much you tell yourself that it’s just music, you cannot resist hearing the play of numbers, the cosmic calculus.

As a rule we don’t want music to act like Spock. We want it to let go, to make us feel, to express inward states. But Bach is a multi-tasker: his logic is unassailable but is not tedious. His proofs soar. He captures the deepest feeling while remaining perfectly logical, thereby demonstrating that those imperatives are not at all opposed. On the strength of this tremendous logic, Nicolas Slonimsky labeled Bach the “supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music,” which seems like hyperbole but isn’t. Bach is much more than a logician – he is Moses, minus Charlton Heston, handing down commandments. Bach’s laws similarly tend to come in convenient even-numbered packages: the thirty-two parts of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), the forty-eight Preludes and Fugues (BWV 846-93), the six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12), the six keyboard Partitas (825-30). They lay down prescriptions about harmony, about the treatment of dissonance, about design and voice-leading – musical morals that most people would never understand but can perceive through Bach’s vision.

Bach’s examples did not intimidate the whole nineteenth century, the way Beethoven’s did, but they were never questioned. We tend to glorify composers who break or stretch the laws: Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, Stravinsky, Debussy. Bach is the exception, a composer whom we love for his rules. And having created them, he sets up shop in them, and takes inspiration from their self-evident goodness. The commandments generate freedom. Owing to this lawfulness, Bach’s choices come to feel permanent, and immune from passing style and taste; they give the illusion of being facts. All other composers seem to be writing novels, but Bach writes non-fiction.

Bach has quite a hoard of virtues. The rectitude is almost annoying: selflessness married to reason married to imagination married to lawfulness married to craft. Bach is a mirror to everything we would like to be; he is almost too good to be true, to be believed. But we believe in Bach on the evidence of the notes themselves. Having invoked fact, law, and logic, I think the larger and more precise term, the umbrella term, to sum up Bach’s mystique is truth. There is a lot of talk of truth and truthiness these days – the death of truth, a post-truth era, and a proliferation of fact checkers debasing the currency in which they pretend to trade. But in Bach’s case we are talking about a certain kind of truth, a necessary truth, even a divine truth, something unarguable. Bach allows us to deny our suspicion that music may be a tissue of lies, a sensory decadence. You cannot wander far into Bach discussion without the invocation of the divine, even in connection with his secular works: cue Beethoven’s “Well-Tempered Bible,” Lipatti’s remark that Bach was “one of the ‘chosen instruments of God himself,’” and Goethe’s observation that it is “as if the eternal harmony were communing with itself, as might have happened in God’s bosom shortly before the creation of the world.” Combine the feeling of divinity with the experience of Bach’s logic and system and you have an intoxicating combination, as if the Bible made perfect sense.

Closely following upon the invocation of God is the invocation of virtue: Bach is music’s claim to morality. Perhaps this last step is the most dangerous. It is a lot for music to bear, this conflation with truth, not to mention virtue. Arguments about Bach become proxy arguments about purity and authenticity. For some reason, people love to tell the story of Wanda Landowska saying to Pablo Casals, “You play Bach your way, and I’ll play him his way.” A memorable boast (and insult), but underneath it you can feel Bach’s truth getting carved up, subjected to territorial disputes. The certitude of Bach’s command of tones seems, like a virus, to infect some artists who play him.

It was playing of such uprightness, to put it into the moral sphere. There was such a sense of repose that had nothing to do with languor, but rather with moral rectitude in the liturgical sense.

This seems to me a bit of a word salad – what is the liturgical sense of rectitude? – but the gist is clear: Bach is to be played uprightly, ethically, correctly. And then read Rosalyn Tureck in turn: “Bach is more than music. It reveals to us, who will listen and perceive, the world to which the highest ideals of man aspire.” Even casting aside the slightly possessive and cultish “us,” think about it: Tureck is not making interpretative choices about the relations of musical tones, she is making choices about the highest ideals of man. Returning to Angela Hewitt’s Times profile, she says at one point that in Bach “there’s no room for fuss or superfluous gestures” and at another that her gowns “reflect my playing: not too frilly.” It’s not hard to read these code words: languor vs. rectitude, frilly, fuss, and so on. Out of Bach’s universal appeal, by some compensatory law, there arise insidious tendencies to moralism, severity, even Puritanical judgment.

Elie’s book is a weave of stories, emulating the play of voices in Bach’s music, and he is not shy about the moral strand: he makes connections between a devotion to Bach and a devotion to causes. The first story we encounter is Albert Schweitzer, aged and at a quandary, recording the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565) in London in 1935:

Thirty years earlier he had renounced a life in music for one in medicine, training to run a clinic for poor people at the village of Lambaréné in the French Congo . . . . He had wanted to do “something small in the spirit of Jesus” – to make his life an argument for a way of being . . . . But his act of renunciation had turned into something else: a double life . . . . Might it not have been better to do something small the way Bach had done, hunkering down behind the organ in Leipzig . . . ?

Right away Elie hits us with music as a moral choice. He reminds us of Schweitzer’s reputation, and of its decline. Once dubbed “the greatest man in the world” by Life, he “now appears a problematic, compromised figure: his project paternalistic, his methods condescending . . . .” But, Elie suggests, the recording will endure, if all his good deeds will not: ten minutes of great playing outweigh a lifetime of virtue. Eventually Schweitzer’s story comes into contact with that of a successor, Pablo Casals:

His experience of war would shape the efforts of his later life into an extramusical role: the artist of conscience, who gives voice to human ideals in the face of diabolical powers . . . . [He] was now known for statements, not concerts . . . . [He] was the very image of moral independence – of the freedom of the individual to judge right from wrong and act accordingly.

I kept wishing that Elie would dig more deeply into the oddness of the odd couple he has brought together: the divinity of Bach and all his moral associations, and the super-secular microphone, an amoral, utterly neutral agent if ever there was one. Just as the art of recording begins to mature, and the story begins to get a bit decadent, leaving Africa (Schweitzer) and war-torn Europe (Casals) for film studios in Hollywood and Santa Barbara (Stokowski), we come across the most peculiar and famous of our heroes, an anti-divinity in his own right. I am referring, of course, to Glenn Gould. He arrives armed and dangerous, a crusader, in the wake of hearing Tureck:

I was fighting a battle in which I was never going to get a surrender flag from my teacher on the way Bach should go, but her records were the first evidence that one did not fight alone.

From this point on, a huge portion of the book is about Gould, which is, alas, inevitable. Figures such as Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim are relegated to cameos. Gould’s story is certainly powerful, and he deserves to be the hero of this tale: he re-invented Bach more radically than anyone else, with a tremendous impact on the world’s understanding of one of the world’s most over-understood composers. But it is really shocking to look back at all the Bachian virtues that we have enumerated, and then contemplate the Gould phenomenon. Against humility, logic, and reason, against Bach’s continuity, his bounded comforting cosmos, we have the fanatically crisp articulation, the humming, the pills, the social ineptitude, the extreme tempi, the ridiculous chair, the retreat into the studio, the media savvy, the anti-lyricism, the recordings made out of spite, the hands soaked in boiling water – this is the madman who became the face of Bach, the paragon of universal Bach. How could this happen? (As I get outraged about Glenn Gould, I realize that I, too, am falling into the moralistic trap.)

The easy answer to my question, of course, is Gould’s electrifying genius. But there is a second factor in Gould’s rise to domination in the interpretation of Bach: a backlash against an image. After Schweitzer, Casals, Landowska, and all their ethical seriousness, all their purity and their conscience, the thing that Bach lacked in the public imagination was the bizarre and the perverse. Gould filled the hole. Sometimes he found perversity in the music and teased it out, but mostly he just slathered it on; piece after piece, he made brilliant but deeply unintuitive, “unnatural” choices, and made them work through sheer force of will, refusing to vanish. He de-coupled logic and virtue.

So we want Bach’s music to be universal, transpersonal, a conduit to the divine, but we also want bizarre insane celebrities to play it. Perhaps we have decided as a civilization that truth is more maniacal, more partial, than it used to be? Elie claims that Gould, in recording the Goldberg Variations, “transcended himself: his isolation and awkwardness, his phobias and idiosyncrasies.” I would argue the opposite: that Gould immortalized his phobias, by grafting them onto Bach. This is not all bad. Gould’s phobias and manias immediately erase the distance of centuries; they dissolve the varnish that has piled up, and make Bach one with the anxieties of the present.

Elie’s book, almost by accident, makes you compare the save-the-world mentality of Schweitzer and Casals with the avoid-the-world mentality of Gould; and gradually the artists seem less like saints than musicians with press releases. As you read about all these icons of Bach performance, you are reminded of Bach’s propensity toward high priests and priestesses. Beethoven specialists are known as great musicians, great interpreters, whereas Bach specialists tend to be viewed vatically, as mediums. I found myself connecting Casals’s moaning and Gould’s humming – for a composer who is supposed to be pure, we sure enjoy a lot of extraneous noise! – the musical equivalent of speaking in tongues, channeling, a kind of cultish signal, a sonic signature of being on the right occult frequency to communicate with the master.

This is a big book, and as someone who struggles with the difficulty of writing about music, this reader felt a lot of empathy for the writer: how do you write about Bach for hundreds of pages without musical examples? You run across a fair number of passages such as this:

With those first long strokes of the bow, a line is being drawn, a series of ultimatums issued…. He might be singing a dirge on the battleground as the smoke clears; the music stays in place as he surveys the damage – the collapsed towers, the skeletal buildings . . .

and this:

[In] this Bach suite he slips in quietly, almost accidentally, pulling the first note out of nowhere with the bow, so that the note, a low G, goes from soft to loud from the beginning of the stroke to the end. It is a sexual entry, a lover’s deft approach. All of a sudden we are in . . .

Yes, he is describing a particular performance, not Bach’s music itself, but still these passages feel like erotica written by someone whose fetishes are different from mine. I found myself in a zone too far away, reading someone’s ideas about someone else’s ideas about Bach’s ideas, and so I sat at the piano to play, with the dubious motive of purifying myself. I started in on the opening movement of the Sonata in F minor (BWV 1018) because it has an extraordinary snuck-in entrance, like the one Elie describes, and it is a perfect example of Bach’s way with truth, logic, and musical metaphor.

The piece begins with a keyboard solo. The violin is nowhere to be found, silent for a good while: this silence is a mystery to be solved. We are in a slow triple time, and the main idea of the piece is exactly three beats long. Each time that we hear the melody, another bar has gone by, another unit of time, another moment of our lives. The keyboard plays the main idea once in the top voice, then travels lower into the middle voice – it is measuring out two units of time, pacing them out. At the same time, however, the harmony is static; we are treading water. (Music is especially hospitable to nuances and paradoxes of motion and stillness.) Then comes the crucial change-up: three bars where the harmony is allowed to move. This happens because – everything in Bach happens because! – the melodic idea continues its journey downward, and ends up in the lowest voice. It’s as if something from the sky moves underground, and shifts the foundation under your feet. Bach is all about the beauties of consequences.

Now that the melody has moved down to the bass, there is room for something new in the upper voices. But Bach doesn’t have to invent something: why would he? He fills it with the most obvious thing at hand: he extracts the first two notes of the existing melody, elongates them, enchains them. He fashions a gorgeous long melody line out of them so that they interact dissonantly – even a bit painfully, you might say – with the faster melody in the bass. Bach demonstrates a thing interacting painfully with itself.

It’s as simple as A and B: two bars of consonant stasis, then three bars of dissonant flux, in which the possibilities of the idea presented in stasis are now seen in motion. This is the kind of basic contrast, a glimpse of two kinds of musical possibility, two temporal states, that Bach is able to wring our hearts with. In fact, at the end of the three moving bars the keyboard reaches the most pained and disturbing of the dissonances. And here comes the magical elided solution to the mystery of the silence of the violin: Bach leaves this last dissonance unresolved, and just at that ambiguous moment – at the end of an unsettling motion that has not quite found a resting place – the violin at last enters, playing an unmoving held note, C. Though not a resolution, this note appears in the guise of one. It doesn’t resolve the unresolved thing; it substitutes a different solution out of nowhere.

Surreptitious, lacking in fanfare, deliberately hidden, the violin holds onto this single note for two measures, like an unblinking gaze. The sustained note has no relation to time, while the keyboard, on which every note decays, keeps marking time, seemingly unaffected. After two bars of this haunting dialectic, the violin leaves the held note to play one unremarkable measure of melody, then immediately, just as unexpectedly as it entered, returns to its earlier silence. This is Bach’s perverse, reverse masterstroke. The stage was beautifully set for nearly nothing. We are left listening to the keyboard again; time resumes. It was an ephemeral moment of eternity.

I hope it is clear from the preceding analysis how each boringly described parameter – two bars of this, then three bars of that, dissonance, enchaining – summons tremendous resonances: a resolution that comes from an utterly unexpected direction; a tension between different senses of time; the power of expectation; the linking of beauty and dissonance, of beauty and pain. The instruments themselves are imbued with symbolic identities, on two sides of a thought-divide. All these things are activated immediately, in a way that Mozart and Haydn can hardly dream of. Eight bars into the “Jupiter” Symphony, for example, Mozart has barely been able to sketch out a premise, whereas some eight bars into this humble violin and keyboard sonata Bach has already created a complex philosophical web. This difference is owed in part to the conventions of the classical style, of course, but also it has something to do with Bach’s specialness. Bach’s purity lies in this promiscuous symbolic reach, grabbing onto a million philosophical ladders at once.

Essays in Truth: in pieces such as BWV 1018, arching forms, in which the last perfect logical permutation clicks into place heartrendingly (one last contribution of the violin, a new counterpoint to the keyboard’s dissonant sequence), Bach draws a distinction between truth as compressed into aphorism (the truism, the talking point, the slogan) and truth as a practice. The sort of musical truths that Bach sketches out – unrepeatable, as no other composer ever came close to replicating these foundational experiments – are the opposite of the inspirational pronouncement. Unfolded over time, in an uncanny mix of narrative and repose, they are not intended to dazzle. They are intended to be lived in; they are well-made like a blade or a bell that rings true.

The conversion of this sort of Bachian verity into a slogan, a flag, or a school is unavoidable but unfortunate. Bach has been used as a weapon with which to attack the “Romantic,” whatever that word means: the pedal is an evil, rubato is indulgent, the piano is a monstrous anachronism, and so on. We use him as a litmus test, a way to define genuine or truthful expression. Elie’s epic makes some reference to a big battle of Bach performance practice enacted over the course of the twentieth century: a move from slow to fast. I have absorbed both ends of this partisan spectrum, from the wonderful gray-haired Blanche Moyse at Marlboro being helped up to the podium to conduct impressively slow cantatas, with the young singers gasping for air, to frenetic accounts of the Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-51) from young German bands that made me think of whizzing coffee grinders. Truth used to be something ponderous, stately, considered; now truth is play, lightness, abandon. Truth, too, is subject to fashion – which is not the same thing as Bach’s vision of truth over time.

I have to confess, this travel back and forth, from truth to slogan to doubt to reconsidered truth, is more interesting to me than Bach’s travel across technologies, and the profusion of Bach recordings. Elie places a lot of faith in recordings, and writes wonderfully about their power and their atmosphere. He suggests at one point that those who resist these new technological manifestations are attached to the past, or more precisely, to the pastness of the past. I disagree. Recordings are certainly here to stay; they are a resource, a vast library of musical thought. If I have qualms about them, it is not because I am a Luddite, but because I am attached to a ridiculously superior technology: the musical score, with all its openness, its perpetual present, its implied possibility.

A score has nothing to do with paper, or e-ink; it can appear on an iPad or on parchment. A score is at once a book and a book waiting to be written. Perhaps a golden age of music was born with the score and died with the recording. If you are listening to a recording, you are hearing someone’s truth about Bach’s truth, their idea of Bach’s truth. The wonderment is that you may hear truths you never suspected, possibilities you never dreamed – but still you are buying another person’s truth. So I say, in all seriousness, if you don’t play an instrument, take one up; take lessons; make the time. After a while, set some Bach on the music stand and play it yourself. Look at the notes on the page, envision the relationships between them. Don’t just press play. Don’t be afraid; we all live too much in fear and awe of the perfectly edited recordings around us. No matter how halting, how un-transcendent, your technique is, I promise that it may be the best Bach you will ever hear.

While the greatest musical dynasties ruled over vast empires of the imagination, their geographic domains were small. The Couperins held the organist post at the church of St. Gervais in Paris for nearly two hundred years from middle of the seventeenth century to well into the nineteenth. For a still longer period legions of Bach relations spread out through the Lutheran heartland of central Germany like industrious musical beavers. Churches, court chapels, schools: these were the modest and often confining venues where the Bachs practiced their craft.

The reach of these august families is dwarfed by that of the most influential of all musical lines – the Newmans of Hollywood. Not yet extending across as many generations as the clans just mentioned, this movie-music dynasty rules the multiplex and therefore the world.

Whereas the most august of the Couperins and Bachs produced some of the monuments the Baroque, from elegant and profound keyboard pieces to monumental vocal works, the Newmans have given the world countless soundtracks and orchestrated even more. J. S. Bach produced more than two hundred cantatas in a handful of years, but the greatest of the Newmans – Alfred the Indefatigable – was still more prolific. This Newman’s career spanned Hollywood’s Golden Age, from City Lights of 1931 (Chaplin himself wrote the score; Newman was his music director) to the star-studded flames of Airport released in 1970, the year of the composer’s death. What is the majesty of the Mass in B minor (BWV 232) as against Newman’s most familiar (and perhaps shortest) piece – the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare, that proudest signal of America’s enduring moving-picture pride and the ultimate Pavlovian cue to moviegoers that two-hours of generally mindless escapism will immediately ensue? Just look at the Academy Award tally: Newman forty Nominations and nine Oscars; Bach zero. (True, the latter should have posthumously gotten the bullet-headed statuette for his laudable work on Silence of the Lambs.)

The next generation of Newmans is at the height of its powers. Nephew Randy approaches seventy and has twenty Academy award nominations to his credit; he’s won only twice, and not for scores, but rather for original songs. When he received the award in 2011 for his song for Toy Story 3 he joked that he was so often at the nominee dinner that the Academy had named a chicken dish after him. Busy in TV and video games and with a few less-than-distinguished features to his credit, Joey Newman represents the third generation of this film composing dynasty. He chose to take his mother’s family name for obvious reasons.

Alfred’s son Thomas Newman was born in 1955, educated at Yale, and already has ten Academy Award nominations, though in line with the low Newman family winning percentage he has yet to win the foolish thing. In a faintly just universe, his 2008 score for the Disney feel-bad-but-then-feel-good-in-spite-of-the-environemtnal-apocalypse WALL-E would have received the award. But no awards in this or any other universe are as arbitrary as the Oscar.

The first forty-five minutes of WALL-E follow the ceaseless diligence of an endearing binocular-eyed robot on a lifeless planet earth reduced to a landfill by human wastefulness. Since the first half of the movie is completely without dialogue, vast sonic space is cleared for Newman’s soundtrack. He makes the most of the opportunity to demonstrate a command of orchestral sonority as nuanced and imaginative as that of his father. The robot’s sense of wonder at the arrival of a spaceship is captured with the shimmering strings and oscillating harmonies beloved of film composers, but here enlivened with winking references to classics like Bizet’s Habanera and maybe even that very same Alfred Newman Fox fanfare. The younger Newman has a great sense of timing, one that must of necessity follow the dictates of the on-screen action. But his score bravely follows its own musical logic as well. No one sends out rushes of sound to collide with silence more dramatically than Newman. Even his rests make sense, something that cannot be said for many a soundtrack.

In his father’s era, the ability to allude to a wider repertory was also vital to film composers, but nowadays the poaching of elements from disparate musical styles is a prerequisite for success in a gourmandizing culture that starts pawing through the fridge for left-overs of yesterday’s feast before the plates heaped with today’s faddish fare have even been cleared from the table. The scene in which WALL-E goes on a first date with a sleek, white and apparently female robot steps around its own maudlin ooze thanks to Newman’s scoring of the encounter with a smoky shuffle and close-harmony doo-waps. Newman supplies the needed comic effect by surrounding an earnest android suitor and airy super model with the sonic haze of a retro 1970s lounge. But even here Newman does not drown in his own irony, but instead splashes happily about on its surface; among other life rings, it’s ardent Bacharach violins that keep the music afloat.

Ease with both the symphonic tradition and world music have equipped Thomas Newman to take up his latest and most ambitious mission: a James Bond soundtrack. Other illustrious film composers, Marvin Hamlisch and John Barry have preceded him. Barry rendered service to eleven of the Bond films, that is nearly half of the current total of twenty-three. Although Barry didn’t compose the theme song (that was done by Monty Norman), he did provide its distinctive sound – the dissonant brass chords, the lecherously distorted guitar riff, the slinky flutes, the bawdy trombones with plunger mutes. That immediately defined the martini swilling, dinner jacket-wearing toff flying around the world keeping its casinos, bars, and beaches safe for democracy. Here was a sound that conveyed chutzpah and cunning and encouraged, even more quickly than one of those martinis, the necessary suspension of disbelief in order to swoon before his literally lady-killing cool.

Each new Bond actor and each new Bond film is now accompanied by pr-driven talk of transformation. The pugilistic face of Daniel Craig certainly helps present an agent who’s been a few times around the bloc, both East and West. Craig’s status as a bona fide A-list leading man helps too. That the auteur Sam Mendes is in the director’s chair – or more frequently helicopter – lends class to the project: Mendes is a fellow Brit who came to Hollywood from the London theatre-world and with his first feature film, American Beauty of 1999, landed one of those Oscar I somehow keep referring to. Newman’s percussion-driven score for the movie was also nominated. American Beauty was pretentious and ponderous, and the music did nothing to relieve the suffocating aura of self-seriousness.

But the Mendes-Newman team certainly provides the kind of prestige that the hoary Bond franchise thinks it needs to trudge on in the post-Cold War era. Before we are even oriented in Skyfall and the sweaty danger of a hot-spot, third world locale in which it opens we get two shock chords which are meant to jolt the audience into knowing immediately that Bond is back and that the he’s still got it. With the sparsest of sonic means, Newman and Mendes literally trumpet their pledge that the brand is intact. Over the subsequent two hours kinetic chases using various kinds of vehicles – from motorcycles to subway cars – are separated from one another with set-piece speeches in which distinguished British actors pontificate about the lasting value of the old human methods of intelligence and espionage that are threatened with obsolescence in the digital age. These intervals of soporific calm are even more boring than they otherwise would because of the absence of music. At least there’s bad-guy Javier Bardem to have some campy fun with his lines. When Dame [!] Judi Dench’s M begins quoting Tennyson before a parliamentary panel, the Bond corporation might as well be appearing in creative bankruptcy court.

When allowed to, Newman’s score tries its best to keep this rambling wreck on the road. After that salvo of vintage chords from his predecessor Barry, Newman is given space after the credits to show his majestic talent by weaving in the sinuous and instantly recognizable Bond chromatic thread into expansive orchestral textures of his own. In Newman’s hands the Bondian motive becomes a kind of cantus firmus; he sneaks it in in one spot and brandishes it like a rocket-launcher in another. With each stop on Bond’s Condé Nast itinerary, Newman amps things with global rhythms, from the techno hustle in the dazzling nocturnal neon of modern Shanghai to the beach drums of what might be Bali. Newman keeps things moving along, but when, like Bond, his hands are tied and his music silenced you feel the movie slump forward in its chair.

The producers think the easiest way to cut him free is with the old gags: I suspect the Broccoli heiress (Barbara) and her half brother Michael Wilson are responsible for bringing the Aston Martin with machine guns hidden in the fender out of mothballs so 007 can road-trip it back to his ancestral manse called Skyfall with M, evil ex-agent Mr. Silver (Barden) close on their heals with an army of cinematic cannon fodder.

As soon as we see that silver sports car the soundtrack reverts to Barry’s Bond music in all its big band glory. This knowing ploy is meant to let is in on the irony of infinite regression: Craig playing the new Bond playing the old Bond. But it’s all been done before: the Aston Martin and the blaring brass have been de-mothballed for at least a couple installments from the Pierce Brosnan interregnum. That Newman is made in Skyfall to reheat the Barry’s classic material is hardly a humiliation – especially at the kind of fees Newman likely pulled in for his work. But it becomes immediately clear that what began with the fresh treatment of overused musical themes, ends in a rout of the new. It is telling that the soundtrack is the first to hoist the white flag of surrender to the imperatives of the brand. In the random darkness of this untethered romp, the music piped in from the past allows one to close the eyes, lean back, and think of an England that doesn’t even qualify as myth.